Tag: Hope

Thinking about Hope with Victoria Safford

On By MaryIn hope, poetryLeave a comment

In these days after celebrating Thanksgiving, I find myself thinking about hope. Whenever hope comes across my awareness, I remember the old proverb, “Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper.” I take that as an admonition that it is a good thing to start with hope, but don’t end there. By the time we get to supper, we should have moved at least a few steps in the direction of building something that alleviates some of the suffering in the world, something that resembles a more merciful and just world, community, family, neighborhood, or household. Well, that’s the dream, anyway. Here’s a poem on hope to inspire your dreaming . . . 

Hope  

by Victoria Safford

Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope—
Not the prudent gates of Optimism,
Which are somewhat narrower.
Not the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense;
Nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness,
Which creak on shrill and angry hinges
Nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of
“Everything is gonna’ be all right.”
But a different, sometimes lonely place,
The place of truth-telling,
About your own soul first of all and its condition.
The place of resistance and defiance,

The piece of ground from which you see the world
Both as it is and as it could be
As it will be;
The place from which you glimpse not only struggle,
But the joy of the struggle.
And we stand there, all of us, beckoning and calling,
Telling people what we are seeing
Asking people what they see.

Remembering Pauli Murray’s Dark Testament

On By MaryIn poetry, winterLeave a comment

Here we are mid-winter, ensconced in ice and snow and soul chilling cold. It is tomato soup and grilled cheese time. It is hearty beef stew time. It is time to hibernate and hope for spring and the freedom that comes with warmth and the flowing of new life.

Oh, it is all of that, and then I turn on the news, and I’m caught up in the darkness. And then I remembered Pauli Murray’s poem Dark Testament, and its meditations on hope and freedom. Here’s a sample:

Dark Testament. Pauli Murray.

In memory of Stephen Vincent Benét.

Freedom is a dream

Haunting as amber wine

Or worlds remembered out of time.

Not Eden’s gate, but freedom

Lures us down a trail of skulls

Where men forever crush the dreamers—

Never the dream.

VERSE 8

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

Now, by all means, head over to your local independently owned bookstore and find a copy of Pauli Murray’s book: Dark Testament: and Other Poems.

I first came to know Pauli Murray through her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt. In an essay published in 1952, Mrs. Roosevelt described Pauli Murray as, “One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer . . . who has been quite a firebrand at times, but of whom I am very fond.” The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice describes her as:

A twentieth-century human rights activist, legal scholar, feminist, poet, author, Episcopal priest, labor organizer, multiracial Black, LGBTQ+ person from Durham, NC, who lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century. S/he was the first Black person to earn a JSD (Doctor of the Science of Law) degree from Yale Law School, a founder of the National Organization for Women and the first Black person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. 

If you want to know more about her life and her friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt, I highly recommend The Firebrand and the First Lady, by Patricia Bell-Scott.

E. B. White and Hope

On By MaryIn Choices we make, hopeLeave a comment

E. B. White is quite a wonderful author. As I troll the web I keep discovering bit and pieces of the literary gems he has so graciously strewn across our world. One of my most favoritest E. B White quotes shares this observation:  “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Then today I was reading the BrainPickings newsletter and came across this letter that White wrote to a man in response to the letter the man had sent to him expressing the gentleman’s distress at the human condition. White’s letter can be found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (public library) – a wonderful collection of letters based on Shaun Usher’s labor-of-love website.

 White’s letter, penned on March 30, 1973, when he was 74, endures as a spectacular celebration of the human spirit:

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E. B. White

 And reading this reminded me hope easy it can be to fall into frustration at the sometimes excruciatingly slow progress in building a world of fairness, respect and compassion, of how many valleys there are along with the peaks of success. What a wonderful testament E. B. White gives us to celebrate human hope and resilience.

 So today, this day, let us all go out into our world and be a source of hope, a source of compassion for at least a few minutes of our day. And if you can’t quite manage that, then at least smile broadly to someone you don’t know. You will either bless their day with an unexpected gift of joy, or set them to wondering what you are up to!